This work builds on graduate research that she co-advised last year at the National Institute of Technology in Surat, India.
The National Science Foundation has selected Utica University computer science professor Rutal Mahajan as a 2026 Undergraduate Research Mentor.
Through the nationally competitive, NSF-supported Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program, two undergraduate students from other universities – tentatively Pace University and Washington and Lee University – will visit Utica University for a 10-week collaborative research experience with Mahajan.
“I am really excited about this opportunity not just for the visiting students, but also for what it means for Utica University,” she says. “It brings external research talent to our campus, elevates our visibility in the computing research community, and creates a wonderful opportunity for our own students to collaborate, peer mentor, and get exposure to a broader research culture.”
Mahajan was selected on the basis of her work in artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and quantum computing. Her research focuses on privacy-aware Natural Language Processing (NLP) for clinical text and quantum computing applications in healthcare data analysis. The students will support the development and evaluation of quantum-enhanced methods for named entity recognition in clinical notes, as well as scalability and noise analysis. NSF-supported National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) computing resources will be used throughout the project.
This work builds on graduate research that she co-advised last year at the National Institute of Technology in Surat, India. Some of the initial results were presented and published at an IEEE conference in May 2025, and the students will have the opportunity to present their work at IEEE Quantum Week 2026 and other national conferences.
Mahajan earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in Surat, India. Her research focuses on natural language processing, low-resource language emotion analysis in multilingual text. She has authored numerous publications and has presented her work at international conferences. In addition, she is a NVIDIA GenAI LLM Certified Associate, NVIDIA Certified Trainer, and serves as the Utica University NVIDIA Ambassador bringing industrial practices in her teaching.
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